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Lethal viruses strike amphibians
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pete oxford/minden pictures
THE white-footed sportive lemur does not need to see its family often – it keeps in touch by urinating instead. Unlike many other primates, these lemurs do not groom each other. They do not share their tree hideouts with others, and go to great lengths to avoid spending time with the mates and offspring they share their territory with. But all clan members use the same group of trees as their toilet, enabling them to leave urine-soaked messages telling others they are still around and a part of the group. Iris Dröscher of the German Primate Centre in Göttingen spent over 1000 hours watching the toilet habits of 14 adult sportive lemurs, and found that family groups went to the same places to defecate and urinate at different times throughout the night (Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, doi.org/ wdg). “The chemical traces in the urine are unique for each lemur, so by leaving scent marks the lemurs can interact and bond with their family without meeting them,” says Dröscher. When male rivals were sensed in the area, lemurs visited their latrine more often, marking the trees using specialised glands. “Scent marks inform an intruder there is a resident male,” Dröscher says.
Saturn’s moon Mimas might host subterranean ocean THERE’S more to Mimas than meets the eye. The wobbles of one of Saturn’s smallest moons hint at something unusual beneath the surface – perhaps an ocean. Mimas isn’t the first of Saturn’s moons to show signs of being soggy, but no one expected to find fluids there. “People thought that this was a boring moon,” says Radwan Tajeddine at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. That picture changed when Tajeddine and his team took a closer look at images from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft.
By comparing the position of Mimas’s craters from one image to the next, they found that its rotation was slightly irregular: it was wobbling about twice as much as expected (Science, doi. org/wdw). An ocean some 30 kilometres below the entire surface could explain the swaying. To see why, think of spinning a raw egg and a hard-boiled egg on a table, says Tajeddine. The raw egg will spin more slowly and unevenly as its liquid insides slosh around. Or perhaps Mimas rotates
the way it does because its core is shaped more like a rugby ball than a sphere. If Mimas formed out of rocks in Saturn’s rings clumping together, rather than condensing from the same material as the planet, then it could have an oddshaped core preserved within. An ocean would be an exciting find, but a bumpy interior is more likely, says Francis Nimmo at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “It’s really hard to understand how an ocean could survive for billions of years inside something as small as Mimas.” Virginie Bled/plainpicture
Wee need to stay in touch...
Lethal viruses strike amphibians AS IF one plague wasn’t enough. The chytrid fungus is already sweeping through the world’s amphibians, and now two killer ranaviruses have ravaged several amphibian populations in Spain. “They haemorrhage throughout their tissues, vomit blood and pass it out through their guts, and suffer huge open ulcers,” says Stephen Price of University College London. These ranaviruses can also cause limb loss. Price and his team have shown that the viruses have caused the collapse of three amphibian species in Spain’s Picos de Europa National Park. The outbreaks have occurred since 2005 in several separate sites across the park. They have mainly affected the common midwife toad, the alpine newt and the common toad, although all six amphibian species native to the most species-rich site in the park have now been infected. Thankfully, says Price, the viruses have not yet overlapped anywhere with the chytrid fungus (Current Biology, doi.org/wf8). The origins of the viruses are unknown. One idea is that imports of amphibians from China, where species like bullfrogs are farmed for food, may have been involved.
Quantum internet... by container ship SIGN here for your quantum delivery. Quantum networks are super secure, but so far they only cover short distances. Extending this to a sort of quantum internet seems like a technological feat – but sending data by container ship could be the solution. Quantum communications are especially useful because the laws of physics mean any attempt to intercept them will be detected. Recent, city-wide quantum networks can send secure data this way, but extending the range would require “quantum repeaters” – and no one
knows how to build them. Now, Simon Devitt of Ochanomizu University in Tokyo and his colleagues say we can bypass the challenges of putting repeaters on the seabed and still create a kind of international quantum internet by loading container ships with quantum data (arxiv.org/abs/1410.3224). Depending on how the information was stored, a fully loaded vessel on a 20-day voyage from Japan to the US would be equivalent to a transfer rate of between 10 bytes per second and 1 terabyte per second.
25 October 2014 | NewScientist | 17
pete oxford/minden pictures
THE white-footed sportive lemur does not need to see its family often – it keeps in touch by urinating instead. Unlike many other primates, these lemurs do not groom each other. They do not share their tree hideouts with others, and go to great lengths to avoid spending time with the mates and offspring they share their territory with. But all clan members use the same group of trees as their toilet, enabling them to leave urine-soaked messages telling others they are still around and a part of the group. Iris Dröscher of the German Primate Centre in Göttingen spent over 1000 hours watching the toilet habits of 14 adult sportive lemurs, and found that family groups went to the same places to defecate and urinate at different times throughout the night (Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, doi.org/ wdg). “The chemical traces in the urine are unique for each lemur, so by leaving scent marks the lemurs can interact and bond with their family without meeting them,” says Dröscher. When male rivals were sensed in the area, lemurs visited their latrine more often, marking the trees using specialised glands. “Scent marks inform an intruder there is a resident male,” Dröscher says.
Saturn’s moon Mimas might host subterranean ocean THERE’S more to Mimas than meets the eye. The wobbles of one of Saturn’s smallest moons hint at something unusual beneath the surface – perhaps an ocean. Mimas isn’t the first of Saturn’s moons to show signs of being soggy, but no one expected to find fluids there. “People thought that this was a boring moon,” says Radwan Tajeddine at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. That picture changed when Tajeddine and his team took a closer look at images from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft.
By comparing the position of Mimas’s craters from one image to the next, they found that its rotation was slightly irregular: it was wobbling about twice as much as expected (Science, doi. org/wdw). An ocean some 30 kilometres below the entire surface could explain the swaying. To see why, think of spinning a raw egg and a hard-boiled egg on a table, says Tajeddine. The raw egg will spin more slowly and unevenly as its liquid insides slosh around. Or perhaps Mimas rotates
the way it does because its core is shaped more like a rugby ball than a sphere. If Mimas formed out of rocks in Saturn’s rings clumping together, rather than condensing from the same material as the planet, then it could have an oddshaped core preserved within. An ocean would be an exciting find, but a bumpy interior is more likely, says Francis Nimmo at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “It’s really hard to understand how an ocean could survive for billions of years inside something as small as Mimas.” Virginie Bled/plainpicture
Wee need to stay in touch...
Lethal viruses strike amphibians AS IF one plague wasn’t enough. The chytrid fungus is already sweeping through the world’s amphibians, and now two killer ranaviruses have ravaged several amphibian populations in Spain. “They haemorrhage throughout their tissues, vomit blood and pass it out through their guts, and suffer huge open ulcers,” says Stephen Price of University College London. These ranaviruses can also cause limb loss. Price and his team have shown that the viruses have caused the collapse of three amphibian species in Spain’s Picos de Europa National Park. The outbreaks have occurred since 2005 in several separate sites across the park. They have mainly affected the common midwife toad, the alpine newt and the common toad, although all six amphibian species native to the most species-rich site in the park have now been infected. Thankfully, says Price, the viruses have not yet overlapped anywhere with the chytrid fungus (Current Biology, doi.org/wf8). The origins of the viruses are unknown. One idea is that imports of amphibians from China, where species like bullfrogs are farmed for food, may have been involved.
Quantum internet... by container ship SIGN here for your quantum delivery. Quantum networks are super secure, but so far they only cover short distances. Extending this to a sort of quantum internet seems like a technological feat – but sending data by container ship could be the solution. Quantum communications are especially useful because the laws of physics mean any attempt to intercept them will be detected. Recent, city-wide quantum networks can send secure data this way, but extending the range would require “quantum repeaters” – and no one
knows how to build them. Now, Simon Devitt of Ochanomizu University in Tokyo and his colleagues say we can bypass the challenges of putting repeaters on the seabed and still create a kind of international quantum internet by loading container ships with quantum data (arxiv.org/abs/1410.3224). Depending on how the information was stored, a fully loaded vessel on a 20-day voyage from Japan to the US would be equivalent to a transfer rate of between 10 bytes per second and 1 terabyte per second.
25 October 2014 | NewScientist | 17